Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4

Fedora 9 will include KDE 4.0.3 by default, so this is a look at the progress of one of the major free desktop environments. KDE 4.0 was released January 11, 2008 after a couple of years of discussions and hype. The initial release was followed by a succession of minor releases that fixed many of the glaring bugs. The project that was initiated on October 14, 1996, so its developers have nearly a decade of experience now. While a lot of things have changed, there is still a familiar feel from its initial days. So what has changed?

Interface changes

The user interfaces changes are immediately visible uponlogin. The Oxygen theme introduces a new look and feel and adopts the freedesktop.org icon naming specification. The hot spot on the top right corner that looks like a golden cashew nut allows you to add widgets—called plasmoids–to your KDE desktop . With the ability to run Windows® Vista® and Mac OS desktop equivalents in the near future, plasmoids can be very attractive and functional. The picture frame plasmoid, for example, would fit very well into a home desktop. The ability to move plasmoids between the panel and desktop seamlessly is a bonus.

Devices: Aaeon, Corvalent, and Renesas Electronics

Aaeon’s COM-KBUC6 is a COM Express Type 6 Compact module with “Kaby Lake” Core-U CPUs, 5x PCIe, 12x USB, and 3x SATA III.
Aaeon has revised its Intel 6th Gen Core based COM-SKUC6 COM Express Type 6 Compact module, which we covered in brief in 2015 as part of Intel’s Skylake announcement, as a new “Kaby Lake” based COM-KBUC6. As you can see from a comparison of the side by side block diagrams below, not much has changed with the new COM-KBUC6 module except for a jump to slightly faster 7th Gen Core processors, once again using the dual-core, 15W U-Series.

Renesas has launched its RZ/G Linux Platform with the industrial-grade Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) Linux kernel, which enables Linux-based embedded systems to be maintained for more than 10 years.

Red Hat and Servers: India, China, Docker and Kubernetes

The open source software company Red Hat is betting big on the Indian market and plans to take its offerings to tier-2 and tier-3 cities as well as neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as public and private sectors increasingly adopt open source software.

In an effort expose its customers to open source solutions, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has entered into a new partnership with Red Hat, a global provider of open source solutions.
In addition becoming part of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, Alibaba Cloud will soon be able to offer its clients access to Red Hat's offerings, which includes the full range of open source cloud solutions, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The latter will be offered as a pay-as-you-go model in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.

First, ask yourself if you will dedicate the server to Docker containers. If a distribution will only serve up Docker containers, examine the Linux variants created for the specific purpose of deploying containers.

Kubernetes’ perceived edge in the container orchestration market, as young as that market is today, is neither definitive nor definite. Its survival may yet depend on competitors’ ability to match customers’ expectations for the essential requirements for orchestration. In the future, enterprises may look for solutions that are bundled or included with larger platforms, or they may simply accept those solutions once they’ve discovered they were already bundled with the platforms in which they’ve already invested.

GNOME: LVFS and Epiphany

Nearly 100 million files are downloaded from the LVFS every month, the majority being metadata to know what updates are available. Although each metadata file is very small it still adds up to over 1TB in transfered bytes per month. Amazon has kindly given the LVFS a 2000 USD per year open source grant which more than covers the hosting costs and any test EC2 instances. I really appreciate the donation from Amazon as it allows us to continue to grow, both with the number of Linux clients connecting every hour, and with the number of firmware files hosted. Before the grant sometimes Red Hat would pay the bandwidth bill, and other times it was just paid out my own pocket, so the grant does mean a lot to me. Amazon seemed very friendly towards this kind of open source shared infrastructure, so kudos to them for that.
At the moment the secure part of the LVFS is hosted in a dedicated Scaleway instance, so any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly buying some (2nd hand?) hardware to include as part of our release-time QA checks.

Epiphany 3.27.1 was released a short time ago as the first development release of this web-browser for the GNOME 3.28 cycle.
For being early in the development cycle there is already a fair number of improvements with Epiphany 3.27.1. Some of the highlights include Google Safe Browsing support, a new address bar dropdown powered by libdazzle, and improvements to the Flatpak support.

I am pleased to announce that Epiphany users will now benefit from a safe browsing support which is capable to detect and alert users whenever they are visiting a potential malicious website. This feature will be shipped in GNOME 3.28, but those who don’t wish to wait that long can go ahead and build Epiphany from master to benefit from it.
The safe browsing support is enabled by default in Epiphany, but you can always disable it from the preferences dialog by toggling the checkbox under General -> Web Content -> Try to block dangerous websites.

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OSS Leftovers

Open source has become an imperative part of every developer’s arsenal. The potential to gather assistance from the community and the capacity to link into a range of systems and solutions make open source incredibly powerful. As open source software becomes ubiquitous, and used by the vast majority of enterprises throughout the world, 2017 is all set for vendors of application delivery controller (ADC) to start providing improved and tighter integration packages for various open source projects, especially surrounding ADC-generated telemetry. Companies have been extensively using their analytics and machine learning capabilities for quite some time to identify actionable patterns from the collected data. With the rising demand for business intelligence, this year is foreseen to be the year of information superiority with businesses, leveraging data as a key differentiator. In the past couple of years, containers have been emerging as an imminent trend. As the business focus starkly shifts on rightsizing of resources, containers are expected to become a common phenomenon, giving businesses the ability to leverage highly portable assets and make the move into micro services much simpler. Adjacently, automation has become essential now. Mostly intensified by DevOps adoption, the automation of software delivery and infrastructure changes have freed developers to spend more time creating and less time worrying about infrastructure.

He continues: “An open source model allows companies to see the assumptions behind the calculation and lowers the cost of entry into the cat modeling business. More importantly, the standardized and interoperable hazard, vulnerability and financial modules included in a true open source model facilitate the collaboration of data from insurers, reinsurers, entrepreneurs, scientists, computer programmers and individuals, all of which may result in a new generation of cat models.”

DevOps is one of the most highly sought skills employers are seeking to fill among 57 percent of respondents in the 2017 Open Source Jobs Report, from Dice and The Linux Foundation. Specifically, firms are looking for developers (73 percent) and DevOps engineers (60 percent).

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst has been working on an updated list of project ideas for new contributors or those that may be wanting to participate in an Endless Vacation of Code / Google Summer of Code.

Oracle had already announced it would be moving Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, and the announcements at JavaOne move the language further to a more vendor-neutral future. It's worth noting that the keynote was preceded by a Safe Harbor disclaimer in which Oracle said it could not be held to plans made during the speech, so nothing is actually certain.

Greg Kroah-Hartman on the behalf of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has today announced the Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement. This statement is designed to better fend off copyright trolls.
Among the copyright troll concerns is how a Netfilter developer has been trying to enforce his personal copyright claims against companies for "in secret and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation."

The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory board, in response to concerns about exploitative license enforcement around the kernel, has put together this patch adding a document to the kernel describing its view of license enforcement. This document has been signed or acknowledged by a long list of kernel developers. In particular, it seeks to reduce the effect of the "GPLv2 death penalty" by stating that a violator's license to the software will be reinstated upon a timely return to compliance.